The 12 Rules of Giving Negative Feedback (Infographic)

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Giving feedback is no easy task — especially when it’s negative. However, it’s important to give colleagues, teammates or employees the necessary feedback in order for them to grow and improve. While you may be nervous that you'll hurt their feelings, there are ways to reduce that risk if you give negative feedback correctly.

Related: Five Steps for Giving Productive Feedback

Creating a culture of feedback, where people feel comfortable giving constructive criticism to each other, is essential to the success of a company. Sometimes people think that negative feedback doesn’t help people improve or that criticism should only be done in private. To the contrary, specific negative feedback can lead to higher performance, and by holding people publicly accountable, they’ll be more likely to take criticism seriously.

In order to promote an environment open to feedback, set a precedence — discuss with your team or company the importance of feedback. It’s also important to put things on a schedule. By having weekly reviews and planning project briefs and debriefs, you’ll be able to set up guidelines for growth.

Related: 5 Tips for Gracefully Accepting Constructive Criticism

From being open-minded to allowing conflicts to occur, there are a number of things you can do to make the feedback process simple and easy. To learn more, check out Headway Capital’s infographic below.